She had an affinity for the pronunciation of names. No matter what the language or dialect, her tongue snapped around its intricacies and held fast, until names blossomed from her lips like a red carpet. There was the croak of a sleepy frog in her susurrant “Mbembe”, the crack of a breaking bough in “Cormac”.
It was only her own name that flapped from her lips and fell, flaccid, to the floor. She did not speak it often in the village. In fact – she spoke it so seldom that her name was forgotten after some years. She fashioned a new one through hints and nudges, never speaking it until its being was formed through the tongues of others. They struggled, lips clawing over syllables, moulding them jaggedly until at once the name took off, exploded into the air like a spout of water. She caught it, and in her mouth the malleable sounds were softly smoothed into a gentle stream, a rush of water over cobblestones.
She was The Whisperer.
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